epi8

Really? Because not even the Kurzweil (who numbers among the more optimistic where this is concerned) agrees with that timeline.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/singularity-q-a

Also, be sure you're in a dense urban environment.

Why?

It's just a superstition. I give demos all the time, and I hate it when I do a test run and people tell me how awesome it's working. Tell me afterwards, you'll jinx it if you tell me before. It doesn't actually work that way, but hot damn it feels like it does.

And the demos I give don't put anyone's lives at risk!

That's a very important distinction that the "easy-mode" metaphors don't really take into account. A good word for it is "intersectionality" (though please note that many people will define intersectionality as only applying to marginalized groups): it's the various ways all of one's "labels" (gender, class, ethnicity, race, etc) interact, and it's something to keep in mind while having these discussions.

The reason is that there isn't one axis along which we can measure "more" or "less" oppressed or disenfranchised. Men tend to lose custody battles more frequently, for instance.

That said, you can still look at a group of people and say something along the lines of "in such-and-such context, members of the first group tend to be more successful at this goal than members of a second group". Phrasing it this way, I think, tends to deflect the "us-vs-them" or "men-vs-women" mentality that crops up fairly often in these discussions (especially when they take place online, where anonymity and lack of non-textual clues make it more difficult to have a civil conversation).

The point of all this is this: if you are a man, you are more likely to kill yourself or be homeless, and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. If you are a black man, by some accounting, you are more likely to be raped than a white woman (because black men are disproportionately sent to prison), and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. But neither of these problems make the discrimination faced by women in the STEM fields less of a problem, it just means that we have many huge problems on our hands.

When you are a member of group A, and group A tends to be more successful than group B (so, male programmers as group A and female programmers as group B), I think it is your obligation to ask _why_ there is this statistical skew, and if the answer is "systematic discrimination due to power imbalance", work to correct it, irrespective of how your group fares in other such comparisons. That doesn't mean that your group faring poorly in these comparisons is not unfair, because it totally is. It just means that there is a complex web of privileges* and disadvantages that we _all_ need to help untangle.

(*You didn't think I was going to get through five paragraphs about identity politics without whipping out the P-word, did you?)

"such as yourself"

I take a fair amount of offense at this statement. I am stating that, given that the word "freedom" is commonly being used not as a word, but as a political catch-phrase with multiple, often contradicting meanings, I prefer to clarify the usage, either by substituting it with another word, or defining carefully what one means by "freedom". Far from attempting to redefine "freedom", I am attempting to _totally ban its usage goddamn it_, since, as you have pointed out, its definition has been co-opted to mean something entirely alien to its original meaning.

Edit: To clarify, when I said ban, I was exaggerating. I am not supporting literally banning the word "freedom", nor sending anyone to the gulags. I simply would prefer if people were to choose other, more exact, less politically-charged words in the place of "freedom".

Can we stop saying things like "more freedom"? Freedom is really poorly defined even to an individual, and tends to lead to sentences like "they hate our freedom".

You could very well argue that freedom means absolutely no laws, absolutely no government, no public sector, period. You could also very well argue that freedom means being able to be confident that you have access to medical care, education, and child-support regardless of who you are, or your income level.

Freedom doesn't actually _mean_ anything anymore, it's just a political catch-phrase.

Can I rephrase your post and say "less government support would scare Francois..."?

Read any of these. Especially the first one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7626878

Who judges if the essay is good?

Running this on the client side would require a C++ compiler in javascript, right? I don't know much about web dev.

If I just got really freaking lucky with my predictions yesterday, then there's no reason to imagine I would get really freaking lucky again. Over time, my average accuracy would become the mean of the distribution.

On the other hand, if I actually _am_ good at making predictions, then I will continue to make good predictions.

The point is that a lot of the time immigrants who received Anglicized names did so not because they chose to, but because they happened to get an immigration officer who gave them an Anglicized spelling on Ellis island.

That's a little unfair. I work at an 30-year-old engineering company with the most market share in our field. If my company goes down, that's probably because someone did something illegal, or entire economies of multiple countries have just bellied-up. I take very minimum risks in that regard. A new start-up, though? Much higher risk of failure.

Good compile-time dispatch is a relatively easy in C++, but damn-near impossible in C. There are actual legitimate reasons to use C++.

Not everyone works in webdev. Some people do embedded development, and use a reasonable subset of C++.

We use way more information than just binocular disparity to construct our stereopsis. Since we extensive experience in our environment, we can use relative sizes of known objects, atmospheric blurring, occlusions, we can move our head and see the apparent shifts of objects, etc. The triangulation provided by our two eyes is not the most powerful of our methods to estimate depth.

These techniques are very hard to reproduce, however. Artificial 3D sensors lean pretty heavily on some sort of triangulation, because it can be formulated mathematically.

Why is ITER not real fusion research? And by "set up" do you mean intentionally, to hold back fusion research? If so, by whom, and why?

"C developers tend to think on micro-optimizations and Assembly level before writing any line of code, even when it doesn't matter at all for the problem being solved."

Um, citation, please? Speaking as, you know, an actual C developer working in a company full of actual C developers, I would say that "bad C developers tend to think on...", etc. There are times when we need to use assembly and micro-opts, but trust me, no one ever wants to.

Though I agree that C++ would be a better language without the backwards compatibility constraint.

I'm not sure that either side is exactly lacking in money or political power. One of the characteristics that many of the tea party members share is a skepticism with regards to climate change (or global warming), and the tea party has a lot of money and political power.

That doesn't affect who is right, of course. But everyone on both sides of this debate seems to have this notion that their side is the scrappy underdog going against a political and corporate behemoth manipulating the truth for profit.

The EFF is a good place (unless I'm wrong, if so, someone let me know).

https://www.eff.org/work

Nothing, and I'm not sure what the "correct" representation would be. However, I do not believe the representation we have now indicates a field with an equal barrier for entry for a man and a woman who have the same skill set, motivation, and intelligence.

I didn't say it was discrimination, in the same way that the conference under discussion is not discrimination. However, have you ever been to a tech conference where, say, a quarter of the attendees were women? I haven't. What I am saying is that creating at least one conference in which a woman is not unusual is not a "wrong" in the way that someone up the thread said.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to claim that conference organizers try to tailor their conference to the demographic who attends. While the vast majority of topics apply equally to men and women, there may be some topics that women will be more interested in, given their minority status in the tech world. I'm saying that it is laudable to create a conference where such topics can more easily be discussed.

I don't know about the person to whom you are replying, but in my opinion, in this case, two wrongs make a right, if you can call hosting a conference aimed at an under-represented group a "wrong". Sure, in a perfect world, we wouldn't want or need such conferences, but in this world, we should strive for the best equality we can manage and not limit ourselves by blind idealism.

If in the future, women and men are equally represented in STEM fields, then we can have a discussion about whether such conferences have outlived their purpose. But since that is not the case today, I think that trying to rectify the imbalances in a reasonable, non-confrontational way that doesn't harm anyone is laudable.

So, I understand your intent, I suppose, but a think a more pragmatic viewpoint could be beneficial. Sure, this conference is aimed at women, but many tech conferences are predominantly aimed at men, simply because that's the largest demographic who attend. This isn't hurting men in any appreciable way, and could encourage more equality later down the road.

Some radical feminists only accept 'born as women' to their conferences.

This may be true in some rare, extreme cases, but is frankly hard to imagine. Can you cite any sources on this? My experience (though I am neither trans nor a woman) is that people involved in the feminist movement or gender-queer community try to treat a trans person as much as possible as any other person of that gender.

Maybe taking siestas with his wife was his passion. Or maybe catching a million fish with machinery isn't as exciting for him as catching one himself. Maybe he had self-actualization up to here.

Formally, you are making assumptions about a fictional character. In addition, check out the "criticism" section of that link you provided. There's a fair amount of doubt as to whether the pyramid is a useful organizational tool.

A "horseless carriage" may be a bit of a contradiction, from a certain point of view, but we don't have a strict definition of what is and what isn't a carriage, so it's not particularly misleading. We have a very strict definition of a corporation, so "autonomous corporation" is misleading. True, language evolves, but the law hasn't yet.

I dislike him because of his stated, explicit bias against LGBT folk, and his frequent rants about the "gay agenda". True, I think his Mormonism motivates these things, but many if not most Mormons feel differently (I have no idea the exact statistics), and were he still Mormon and not a homophobic bigot, then I wouldn't have a problem with him.

I also liked Ender's Game as a kid. I like it now. I just think the author is a jackass.

I'm not doubting, but why?

I think you, GP, and the author are in violent agreement. All three of you, in my understanding, have made the same point.

That's... not true. The question is "how likely is there to be an electrical fire in the Tesla, given that it has crashed (or is crashing)" not "how likely is there to be an electrical fire".

It's easy enough for things not to catch flame when they're being used properly; the real test is how things behave when other things are going wrong.

That's not to say that this means all Tesla cars are fiery death-traps of doom. Just that the sample size really is the number of crashed cars.

Any idea whether this depends on the projection used to get the map in the first place? I mean, the "straight lines" are really curves that lie in the boundary of the Earth's surface, unless I'm missing something major.